Demonstrating the growing importance of incorporating mobility into
enterprises, most CIOs believe mobility will generate significant
sources of new revenue for their businesses, and most will invest 31 -
40 percent of their discretionary budgets to achieve that goal –
compared with only 19 percent of CIOs surveyed last year – according to
Accenture (NYSE:ACN).

InThe
Accenture 2013 CIO Mobility Survey, the overwhelming
majority of respondents (79percent) cited mobility as a revenue
generator and said it would significantly improve customer interactions
(84 percent) as well as significantly affect their business (83
percent). The survey also revealed that mobility is a top priority in
the coming year for more than one-third (34 percent) of CIOs; and 42
percent of CIOs ranked mobility as one of their top five priorities.
Anecdotal data from interviews also suggests that many CIOs approach new
IT projects with a “mobile first” thinking.

Regarding specific mobile capabilities, survey respondents indicated
that improving field and customer service with instant data access,
capture and processing topped the list of needs (43 percent), followed
by engaging customers via mobile devices (36 percent), especially with
transactions on mobile devices (34 percent). Twenty-nine percent of all
respondents said they plan to design, develop and/or distribute
connected devices to support B2B applications.

Accenture conducted the global survey of CIOs and other C-suite IT
professionals to understand if companies are embracing the importance of
mobility and to identify the top priorities of IT professionals, and the
obstacles to achieving them.

Over the next year, nearly half (46 percent) of CIOs said they plan to
make workflow changes to better incorporate mobility into the business.
Additionally, 73 percent believe mobility will impact their business as
much or more than the web revolution of the late 90s, compared to 67
percent who felt this way in a similar Accenture survey conducted last
year.

“It’s encouraging that companies are embracing the importance of
mobility but they need to go further by identifying the top areas for
mobile deployment,” said Jin Lee, senior managing director, Accenture
Mobility. “In particular they should look at areas that will grow, such
as connected devices, and conduct a ‘gap analysis’ to determine how to
catch up, or even better, get ahead of the curve. Other critical
considerations include investments, budget allocation, re-training
staff, hiring mobile expertise, and leveraging external experts to help
develop or implement mobility strategies.”

Progress in mobile strategy varies

More than half of the companies surveyed (58 percent) have a moderately
developed formal mobile strategy, and about one-quarter (23 percent)
have an extensively-developed formal mobile strategy, down from 31
percent from last year. This suggests that the velocity of the uptake of
mobile technology is accelerating to the extent that companies are being
pushed to take action before they can get a well-defined strategy in
place.

China (50 percent), Italy (47 percent) and Brazil (37 percent) lead the
way globally with extensively-developed mobile strategies. Despite
varied progress in strategy development, half (50 percent) of the
companies surveyed said they would identify prioritized mobility
initiatives over the next year, an increase over last year (41 percent).
Nearly all said their mobile strategies must support smartphones (85
percent) and tablets (78 percent), a nod to the increase in employees’
use of their own tablets for work, and companies’ deployment of tablets
as work devices.

The survey further found that mobile device management (27 percent),
collaboration (25 percent) and knowledge sharing (23 percent) are the
top three most important features to a developed mobile strategy. When
participants were asked about their top two priorities, China (53
percent), Italy (53 percent) and India (50 percent) tagged mobility as
one of their top two focus areas. The United Kingdom (67 percent), Japan
(57 percent), and France (52 percent) ranked mobility as one of their
top five IT priorities.

Most respondents in India (77 percent), and almost half (47 percent) of
respondents in Japan, Mexico, and the United Kingdom plan to focus their
enterprise efforts on improving field and customer service delivery with
instant data access, capture and processing. In consumer-related
mobility priorities, 63 percent of respondents in India and the United
Kingdom cited driving revenue through transactions on mobile devices
within their top priorities, followed by the United States (36 percent).

Staffing, Security, interoperability, BYOD continue as challenges

Fifty-two percent of companies said they would retrain existing staff to
enable their mobile strategies, and 37 percent will hire full-time
mobile expertise into their organization, indicating a high demand in
the market for mobility talent. The survey also found that more projects
are being staffed internally (76 percent in 2013, versus 63 percent in
2012) to support the development of mobile applications. Surprisingly,
while 2012 may be remembered as the year HTML5 took the Internet by
storm -- the catch-all term used for the latest protocols that define
the content, layout, and navigation of web pages through web browsers --
almost half (49 percent) of respondent companies’ mobile application
approaches relied on both native and web apps.

CIO, CTO & Developer Resources

Security is still a significant concern, and interoperability has risen
as an issue, indicating that existing systems were not all built for
mobile and must be transformed for adoption to continue. The study found
that security (45 percent), budget concerns (41 percent) and lack of
interoperability with legacy systems (31 percent) are still the main
barriers cited by companies as impacting their mobile priorities.

Another area related to mobile adoption is “bring your own device,” or
BYOD. However, more than half of the enterprises surveyed (59 percent)
provide only limited support to their employees while about one-quarter
(28 percent) offer full support.

“CIOs must find ways to support the myriad of mobile devices entering
the work environment,” Lee said. “They should also address the need to
focus intensely on people and expertise. Almost twice as many companies
– 40 percent in 2013, versus 27 percent in 2012 – plan to leverage
external experts to develop and refine their strategy, indicating that
mobile usage is growing faster than the market can provide in terms of
skilled and available talent.”

All (100 percent) respondents in the automotive, insurance, and health
care sectors plan to reach their top mobile priorities within the next
year. For the automotive industry, the most important feature to its
strategy is payments and commerce (54 percent); the insurance industry
respondents cited location-based services (48 percent) as most
important, as did health care providers (46 percent). Among
communications companies citing M2M as a mobile priority, sixty-seven
percent said they would execute M2M communications in their organization
within the next year.

Other key industry findings include:

the electronics (52 percent) and technology industries (47 percent)
placed mobility as one of their top two priorities;

more than half (57 percent) of the aerospace industry cited mobility
as one of its top five priorities;

From Dec. 2012 through Jan. 2013, Accenture conducted an online survey
with 413 IT professionals (CIOs, CTOs, Directors of Technology or IT,
and Chief Mobility Officers) across 14 industries in 14 countries:
Australia, Brazil, China, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan,
Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, United Kingdom, and United States.
Fifty-three percent of those surveyed work for companies that generate
between US$1 billion and US$5 billion in annual revenues; 42 percent for
companies that generate between US$500 million and US$1 billion; and 6
percent for companies between US$250 million and US$500 million.

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and
outsourcing company, with approximately 259,000 people serving clients
in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience,
comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions,
and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies,
Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance
businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of
US$27.9 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2012. Its home page
is www.accenture.com.

Accenture is focused on enabling its clients to achieve breakthrough
growth throughout the rapidly changing mobile ecosystem. Accenture
Mobility offers five mobility services including consulting, software
services – applications, software services – devices and platforms,
managed services, and business integration services. These are designed
to help organizations embrace business to employee (B2E), business to
consumer (B2C), business to business (B2B) and machine to machine (M2M)
business opportunities. Accenture offers mobility and embedded software
services across a wide range of industries and platforms, including
Android™, Apple® iOS, Blackberry®, Linux, Meego™, Symbian, Windows®
Phone and Windows 8.

Internet of Things (IoT) will be a hybrid ecosystem of diverse devices and sensors collaborating with operational and enterprise systems to create the next big application.
In their session at @ThingsExpo, Bramh Gupta, founder and CEO of robomq.io, and Fred Yatzeck, principal architect leading product development at robomq.io, will discuss how choosing the right middleware and integration strategy from the get-go will enable IoT solution developers to adapt and grow with the industry, while at the same time reduce Time to Market (TTM) by using plug and play capabilities offered by a robust I...

After making a doctor’s appointment via your mobile device, you receive a calendar invite. The day of your appointment, you get a reminder with the doctor’s location and contact information. As you enter the doctor’s exam room, the medical team is equipped with the latest tablet containing your medical history – he or she makes real time updates to your medical file. At the end of your visit, you receive an electronic prescription to your preferred pharmacy and can schedule your next appointment.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Solgenia will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Solgenia is the global market leader in Cloud Collaboration and Cloud Infrastructure software solutions. Designed to “Bridge the Gap” between Personal and Professional Social, Mobile and Cloud user experiences, our solutions help large and medium-sized organizations dr...

While not quite mainstream yet, WebRTC is starting to gain ground with Carriers, Enterprises and Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s) alike. WebRTC makes it easy for developers to add audio and video communications into their applications by using Web browsers as their platform. But like any market, every customer engagement has unique requirements, as well as constraints. And of course, one size does not fit all.
In her session at WebRTC Summit, Dr. Natasha Tamaskar, Vice President, Head of Cloud and Mobile Strategy at GENBAND, will explore what is needed to take a real time communications ...

The world's leading Cloud event, Cloud Expo has launched Microservices Journal on the SYS-CON.com portal, featuring over 19,000 original articles, news stories, features, and blog entries.
DevOps Journal is focused on this critical enterprise IT topic in the world of cloud computing.
Microservices Journal offers top articles, news stories, and blog posts from the world's well-known experts and guarantees better exposure for its authors than any other publication.
Follow new article posts on Twitter at @MicroservicesE

SYS-CON Events announced today that Litmus Automation will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Litmus Automation’s vision is to provide a solution for companies that are in a rush to embrace the disruptive Internet of Things technology and leverage it for real business challenges. Litmus Automation simplifies the complexity of connected devices applications with Loop, a secure and scalable cloud platform.

SYS-CON Events announced today the IoT Bootcamp – Jumpstart Your IoT Strategy, being held June 9–10, 2015, in conjunction with 16th Cloud Expo and Internet of @ThingsExpo at the Javits Center in New York City. This is your chance to jumpstart your IoT strategy.
Combined with real-world scenarios and use cases, the IoT Bootcamp is not just based on presentations but includes hands-on demos and walkthroughs. We will introduce you to a variety of Do-It-Yourself IoT platforms including Arduino, Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, Spark and Intel Edison. You will also get an overview of cloud technologies s...

Containers and microservices have become topics of intense interest throughout the cloud developer and enterprise IT communities.
Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming 16th Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York June 9-11 will find fresh new content in a new track called PaaS | Containers & Microservices
Containers are not being considered for the first time by the cloud community, but a current era of re-consideration has pushed them to the top of the cloud agenda. With the launch of Docker's initial release in March of 2013, interest was revved up several notches. Then late last...

The WebRTC Summit 2015 New York, to be held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York, NY, announces that its Call for Papers is open. Topics include all aspects of improving IT delivery by eliminating waste through automated business models leveraging cloud technologies. WebRTC Summit is co-located with 16th International Cloud Expo, @ThingsExpo, Big Data Expo, and DevOps Summit.

SOA Software has changed its name to Akana. With roots in Web Services and SOA Governance, Akana has established itself as a leader in API Management and is expanding into cloud integration as an alternative to the traditional heavyweight enterprise service bus (ESB). The company recently announced that it achieved more than 90% year-over-year growth. As Akana, the company now addresses the evolution and diversification of SOA, unifying security, management, and DevOps across SOA, APIs, microservices, and more.

Wearable technology was dominant at this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) , and MWC was no exception to this trend. New versions of favorites, such as the Samsung Gear (three new products were released: the Gear 2, the Gear 2 Neo and the Gear Fit), shared the limelight with new wearables like Pebble Time Steel (the new premium version of the company’s previously released smartwatch) and the LG Watch Urbane.
The most dramatic difference at MWC was an emphasis on presenting wearables as fashion accessories and moving away from the original clunky technology associated with t...

SYS-CON Events announced today that robomq.io will exhibit at SYS-CON's @ThingsExpo, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
robomq.io is an interoperable and composable platform that connects any device to any application. It helps systems integrators and the solution providers build new and innovative products and service for industries requiring monitoring or intelligence from devices and sensors.

The list of ‘new paradigm’ technologies that now surrounds us appears to be at an all time high. From cloud computing and Big Data analytics to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and the Internet of Things (IoT), today we have to deal with what the industry likes to call ‘paradigm shifts’ at every level of IT.
This is disruption; of course, we understand that – change is almost always disruptive.

SYS-CON Events announced today that SafeLogic has been named “Bag Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo® New York, which will take place June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
SafeLogic provides security products for applications in mobile and server/appliance environments. SafeLogic’s flagship product CryptoComply is a FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic engine designed to secure data on servers, workstations, appliances, mobile devices, and in the Cloud.

GENBAND has announced that SageNet is leveraging the Nuvia platform to deliver Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) to its large base of retail and enterprise customers. Nuvia’s cloud-based solution provides SageNet’s customers with a full suite of business communications and collaboration tools.
Two large national SageNet retail customers have recently signed up to deploy the Nuvia platform and the company will continue to sell the service to new and existing customers. Nuvia’s capabilities include HD voice, video, multimedia messaging, mobility, conferencing, Web collaboration, deskt...

SYS-CON Media announced today that @WebRTCSummit Blog, the largest WebRTC resource in the world, has been launched.
@WebRTCSummit Blog offers top articles, news stories, and blog posts from the world's well-known experts and guarantees better exposure for its authors than any other publication.
@WebRTCSummit Blog can be bookmarked ▸ Here
@WebRTCSummit conference site can be bookmarked ▸ Here

SYS-CON Events announced today that Cisco, the worldwide leader in IT that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate, has been named “Gold Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Cisco makes amazing things happen by connecting the unconnected. Cisco has shaped the future of the Internet by becoming the worldwide leader in transforming how people connect, communicate and collaborate. Cisco and our partners are building the platform for the Internet of Everything by connecting the...

Temasys has announced senior management additions to its team. Joining are David Holloway as Vice President of Commercial and Nadine Yap as Vice President of Product.
Over the past 12 months Temasys has doubled in size as it adds new customers and expands the development of its Skylink platform. Skylink leads the charge to move WebRTC, traditionally seen as a desktop, browser based technology, to become a ubiquitous web communications technology on web and mobile, as well as Internet of Things compatible devices.

Docker is an excellent platform for organizations interested in running microservices. It offers portability and consistency between development and production environments, quick provisioning times, and a simple way to isolate services.
In his session at DevOps Summit at 16th Cloud Expo, Shannon Williams, co-founder of Rancher Labs, will walk through these and other benefits of using Docker to run microservices, and provide an overview of RancherOS, a minimalist distribution of Linux designed expressly to run Docker. He will also discuss Rancher, an orchestration and service discovery platf...

SYS-CON Events announced today that Vitria Technology, Inc. will exhibit at SYS-CON’s @ThingsExpo, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Vitria will showcase the company’s new IoT Analytics Platform through live demonstrations at booth #330. Vitria’s IoT Analytics Platform, fully integrated and powered by an operational intelligence engine, enables customers to rapidly build and operationalize advanced analytics to deliver timely business outcomes for use cases across the industrial, enterprise, and consumer segments.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Mark Thiele, EVP of Data Center Technology at Switch.
We discuss the idea that private clouds are often equated with do-it-yourself and why that should be changed.
Taking sure you are receiving the private environment you need at a cost that can support your business.
Listen in to learn the different ways to own and manage a private cloud.

It seems today we are in a constant state of business and technology disruption. The convergence of the social, mobile, analytics, and cloud (SMAC) disruptions have both forced and enabled organizations to move at breakneck speeds addressing the needs and expectations of the lines of business/end users. This speed requires the development teams to be agile. They must be able to respond quickly to changing needs and demands of the organization. The quality assurance (QA) team still needs to ensur...

OmniTI has expanded its services to help customers automate their processes to deliver high quality applications to market faster.
Consistent with its focus on IT agility and quality, OmniTI operates under DevOps principles, exploring the flow of value through the IT delivery process, identifying opportunities to eliminate waste, realign misaligned incentives, and open bottlenecks. OmniTI takes a unique, value-centric approach by plotting each opportunity in an effort-payoff quadrant, then work...

If you have a Network Operations Center (or NOC, as the kids call it), you have a skilled set of eyes monitoring your system and alerting your engineers when things go wrong. (If you have something like a NOC, such as a first tier team that processes tickets, we’re looking at you, too). You also probably have strict SLAs and a need for high availability at all times. You can’t waste a second when things go down. Solutions like PagerDuty that help you identify and resolve incidents faster can hel...

DevOps is all the rage these days and with good reason as it promises to reduce the time-to-market for new applications. It also promises to improve change management, allowing teams to deploy changes to their applications quickly and efficiently. However, DevOps isn’t something you buy, install, or implement; rather it is the symptom of an appropriate organizational system.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Mark Thiele, EVP, Data Center Technologies at SUPERNAP International, will discuss how ...

When it comes to microservices there are myths and uncertainty about the journey ahead. Deploying a “Hello World” app on Docker is a long way from making microservices work in real enterprises with large applications, complex environments and existing organizational structures. February 19, 2015 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET → 45 Minutes Join our four experts: Special host Gene Kim, Gary Gruver, Randy Shoup and XebiaLabs’ Andrew Phillips as they explore the realities of microservices in today’s IT worl...

You deployed an app. Nothing has changed in three days, but it suddenly crashes. Why? Memory leak.
You deployed an app. Nothing has changed in three weeks, but it suddenly stops working. Why? A database query came back empty and the web application freaked out trying manipulate a null value, deciding instead to just stop in its track and return nothing.
You deployed a load balancing service. Nothing has changed in three months, but it suddenly stopped load balancing your app. Why? One of the...

For me the mantra of achieving speed via automation tools is nothing new. In fact I was ‘automating’ Citrix Metaframe builds using windows scripting techniques back in 2004. The market though, has become awash with different automation products and it’s fair to say that many enterprises now suffer from ‘automation sprawl’. This results in a tactical rather than the strategic approach to automation required, meaning that benefits are never fully realized. In fact, I have spoken to many companies ...

Even though it’s now Microservices Journal, long-time fans of SOA World Magazine can take comfort in the fact that the URL – soa.sys-con.com – remains unchanged. And that’s no mistake, as microservices are really nothing more than a new and improved take on the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) best practices we struggled to hammer out over the last decade. Skeptics, however, might say that this change is nothing more than an exercise in buzzword-hopping. SOA is passé, and now that people are ...

While recently attending a Dynatrace User Group in Hartford, I had the opportunity to sit in on a great presentation from a leading US insurance company as they explained their three-year APM journey. I see a lot of these success stories, but this one was especially impressive. To see how they have refined their internal processes, successes and performance best practices to ensure delivery of high quality, high performing and highly scalable applications over these years.
The performance engin...

Microservices are the result of decomposing applications. That may sound a lot like SOA, but SOA was based on an object-oriented (noun) premise; that is, services were built around an object - like a customer - with all the necessary operations (functions) that go along with it. SOA was also founded on a variety of standards (most of them coming out of OASIS) like SOAP, WSDL, XML and UDDI. Microservices have no standards (at least none deriving from a standards body or organization) and can be b...

So HTTP/2 is official. That means all the talking is (finally) done and after 16 years of waiting, we've got ourselves a new lingua franca of the web.
Okay, maybe that's pushing it, but we do have a new standard to move to that offers some improvements in the areas of resource management and performance that make it definitely worth taking a look at.
For example, HTTP/2 is largely based on SPDY (that's Google's SPDY, for those who might have been heads down in the data center since 2009 an...

As a group of concepts, DevOps has converged on several prominent themes including continuous software delivery, automation, and configuration management (CM). These integral pieces often form the pillars of an organization’s DevOps efforts, even as other bigger pieces like overarching best practices and guidelines are still being tried and tested. Being that DevOps is a relatively new paradigm - movement - methodology - [insert your own label here], standards around it have yet to be codified a...

Microservices, for the uninitiated, are essentially the decomposition of applications into multiple services. This decomposition is often based on functional lines, with related functions being grouped together into a service. While this may sound a like SOA, it really isn't, especially given that SOA was an object-centered methodology that focused on creating services around "nouns" like customer and product. Microservices, while certainly capable of being noun-based, are just as likely to be v...

Our guest on the podcast this week is Jesse Proudman, Founder and CTO of Bluebox. We discuss Walmart’s recent OpenStack success story and the expanding capabilities of DIY private clouds. While DIY private clouds require large investments in configuring open source software to meet business needs, they can have several advantages over managed services alternatives. Listen in to learn how a DIY model could make or break private cloud deployment.

Containers and microservices have become topics of intense interest throughout the cloud developer and enterprise IT communities.
Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming 16th Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York June 9-11 will find fresh new content in a new track called PaaS | Containers & Microservices
Containers are not being considered for the first time by the cloud community, but a current era of re-consideration has pushed them to the top of the cloud agenda. With the launch ...

Being a huge supporter of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), specifically, container-based PaaS, such as CloudFoundry and Heroku, I decided to apply my pricing experience to hacking up an estimate for delivering a mobile application inclusive of development through operations. The goal for me was to see if my own assertions that PaaS actually reduced both development and operating costs could be supported. My results were verified by both and independent consulting peer and a provider of PaaS.

The 16th Cloud Expo has added coverage containers and microservices to its program for New York, to be held June 9-11 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center.
Cloud Expo has long been the single, independent show where delegates and technology vendors can meet to experience and discuss the entire world of the cloud. This year will be no different.
Containers are an old concept that saw renewed life with the emergence of Docker in 2013. Then late in 2014, CoreOS shook up the cloud-computing w...

As pointed out by Mark, it’s very easy to make the cloud look financially attractive when pricing out a single application versus a portfolio of applications. Indeed, I would have to agree one of the most difficult things is to formulate an apples-to-apples comparison of cloud to data center. Even with the concept of reservations, the cloud cannot come close to the amortization of capital allocations across a portfolio of applications. The cloud is all about sizing and costing one application at...

Our guest on the podcast this week is Jason Bloomberg, President at Intellyx. When we build services we want them to be lightweight, stateless and scalable while doing one thing really well. In today’s cloud world, we’re revisiting what to takes to make a good service in the first place.microservices
Listen in to learn why following “the book” doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re solving key business problems.

The competition among public cloud providers is red hot, private cloud continues to grab increasing shares of IT budgets, and hybrid cloud strategies are beginning to conquer the enterprise IT world.

Big Data is driving dramatic leaps in resource requirements and capabilities, and now the Internet of Things promises an exponential leap in the size of the Internet and Worldwide Web.

The world of SDX now encompasses Software-Defined Data Centers (SDDCs) as the technology world prepares for the Zettabyte Age.

Add the key topics of WebRTC and DevOps into the mix, and you have three days of pure cloud computing that you simply cannot miss.

Cloud Expo - the world's most established event - offers a vast selection of 130+ technical and strategic Industry Keynotes, General Sessions, Breakout Sessions, and signature Power Panels. The exhibition floor features 100+ exhibitors offering specific solutions and comprehensive strategies. The floor also features two Demo Theaters that give delegates the opportunity to get even closer to the technology they want to see and the people who offer it.

Attend Cloud Expo. Craft your own custom experience. Learn the latest from the world's best technologists. Find the vendors you want and put them to the test.